Cue Dragnet Theme; or Email-Gate

Folks, we have got to put values back into politics. This story- which may or may not break out into scandle-dom- should really give us pause.

It looks like, over the period of a year, GOP staff members infiltrated secret democratic emails.

From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.

And our old friend Novak steps in again to impliment questionable GOP ethics:

Democrats now claim their private memos formed the basis for a February 2003 column by conservative pundit Robert Novak that revealed plans pushed by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, to filibuster certain judicial nominees. Novak is also at the center of an investigation into who leaked the identity of a CIA agent whose husband contradicted a Bush administration claim about Iraqi nuclear programs.

Citing "internal Senate sources," Novak's column described closed-door Democratic meetings about how to handle nominees.

Its details and direct quotes from Democrats -- characterizing former nominee Miguel Estrada as a "stealth right-wing zealot" and describing the GOP agenda as an "assembly line" for right-wing nominees -- are contained in talking points and meeting accounts from the Democratic files now known to have been compromised.

Novak declined to confirm or deny whether his column was based on these files.

"They're welcome to think anything they want," he said. "As has been demonstrated, I don't reveal my sources."

Let me again say that this story is about character. The memos and the use thereof stem out of the confirmation battles. That debate should be a public one, and a thoughtful one- a point the GOP itself tried to make with its two day debate-a-thon last fall. In that vein, the debate should be as fair, rhetorically, as possible- one ground rule: no using stolen emails.
To his great credit (and to my increasing admiration of his principle, if not his ideas) Orin Hatch wanted no part of this- and tried to nip it in the bud:

After the contents of those memos were made public in The Wall Street Journal editorial pages and The Washington Times, Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, made a preliminary inquiry and described himself as "mortified that this improper, unethical and simply unacceptable breach of confidential files may have occurred on my watch."

Hatch also confirmed that "at least one current member of the Judiciary Committee staff had improperly accessed at least some of the documents referenced in media reports."

Well....let's see where all this goes.